Losing Palestine

[Mosby]

Even four weeks into this latest surge in violence, in the fast succession of stabbings and protests and funerals and pronouncements, it can be hard to figure out exactly what this round of terror attacks is actually about.

There is no shortage of explanations, of course, but they usually say more about the explainer than the phenomenon they are explaining.

Many pundits sympathetic to the Palestinians’ plight have said the killings are driven by economic or political “frustration” — a statement the attackers themselves, along with their most passionate supporters in Palestinian politics, often seem to contradict when they insist they are motivated by devotion to God, Islam or the vision of a redeemed Palestine.

Those who sympathize with the Israelis blame Palestinian “fanaticism” and point to the attackers’ own rhetoric as proof. Yet that rhetoric, for all its rejectionism, does not explain this specific outburst, since it does not mark a change from the past. The Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel has been warning for decades that the Jews are trying to “steal” Al-Aqsa. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has been extolling the “martyrs” — among them the killers of Israeli schoolchildren — for years, to the consternation of Israelis and the complete disinterest of everyone else.

Neither “fanaticism” — the term itself is a judgment, not a description — nor “frustration” really encapsulate what the attacks mean in the cultural and political context that spawned them, and to which they are speaking: the Palestinian collective consciousness.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/losing-palestine/

Excellent analysis of the current situation.

[Scootaloo]

1. "the Palestinian collective consciousness. "

A subject which I am sure that a man named Haviv Rettig Gur is well-qualified to tell us about.

[King_David]

2. There's some in this group that tell u about the Jewish American collective

Even some that have never met a Jewish American.

[Scootaloo]

4. And you embrace those voices, I suppose?

[oberliner]

3. You really need a name like Max Blumenthal or Ben White

Or maybe George Galloway.

[BillZBubb]

5. The author of this simplisitic analysis makes one logical error after another.

There is no necessary contradiction in the various explanations of what is happening. They all stem from a obvious common condition.

[geek tragedy]

6. The presumption in this article is that Palestinians have no common interest

other than destroying Israel. Though it disparages some Israeli myth-making, it certainly peddles its own.

He talks about the despair of Palestinians, but somehow manages to miss the fact that they despair not of destroying Israel, but of controlling their own destiny and having their own state.

He also ignores a giant problem: if Palestinian nationalism goes away, then there's literally no way to even talk about a two-state solution, and the only thing to talk about is when a one-state solution gets implemented and in how many phases it takes before Zionism joins Palestinian nationalism on the road to nowhere.